A young English solicitor travels to a castle in the Carpathians to finish a property sale, and slowly understands that his courtly host casts no reflection, scales the outer walls like a lizard, and means never to let him leave. From that trap the dread moves west to England — a derelict ship run aground with its dead captain lashed to the wheel, a sleepwalking girl going pale night by night, and a Dutch professor who alone will say the word 'vampire' out loud. Stoker built the whole novel out of journals, letters, and phonograph cylinders, and in the assembling laid down the template every vampire story since has quietly borrowed from.